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If you’re looking for a wholemeal cake recipe, I tried out this Whole Wheat Coffee Cake from Bob’s Red Mill today. There’s no coffee in it at all, so I guess the name refers to the fact that it goes well with a cup of coffee, which is what is described here. The end result was excellent – extremely light and fluffy.

Also reduced the amount of sugar by cutting out the filling/topping, and reducing sugar in the main recipe to 3/4 cup. The result is just right.

Buttermilk is very expensive to buy so I used this substitute recipe: 1 cup (240 ml) milk + 1 1/4 tsp cream of tartar. The acidic buttermilk reacts with baking soda to produce a leavening effect, which baking soda+cream of tartar also does. Read my earlier post about leavening agents.

The instructions don’t really go into details about this but I deduced that the butter and sugar should be creamed before adding the eggs and vanilla essence. I remember the mistakes I made when making Banana Cake, so I was careful to add the eggs only a little bit at a time and ensure each bit was well mixed in. Having recently acquired the book Baking at Home with The Culinary Institute of America and read the section on creaming, I tried to cream the mixture thoroughly to incorporate plenty of air. As I mentioned, the texture of the cake turned out fabulous so my efforts at doing the creaming properly paid off. [However, this article says that coffee cakes are usually made by the muffin method: wet ingredients + dry ingredients, mixed till just blended, which isn’t what the Bob’s Red Mill recipe instructed.]

Finally, instead of baking it in a loaf shape, which would have sucked up 55 mins of power to run the oven, I scooped the mixture into 24 paper cases and they were done in just 20 mins.

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[…] Double Wheat Cookies Published November 12th, 2007 baking , recipes , wholemeal This Sunday was much less of a baking frenzy than last weekend when I produced three different items in one day (OK, I cheated: one of them was a bread machine loaf ^.^). Having finished my batch of these corn muffins, I needed to make a new snack for the week to come. I flipped through various recipes I’d collected and was attracted by the simplicity of this one and the opportunity to use up the wheat germ I bought to make this wholemeal coffee cake. […]